Apple, Amazon and Google face the wrath of May

Britain’s first unelected woman Prime Minister is ending the cosy relationship that her government had with Apple, Amazon and Google.

Theresa May has decided that the previous chancellor George Osborne’s moves to write off the tax which should have been paid by Google, Amazon and Apple was not a good idea. Osborne allowed the Google to go free by negotiating that Google should play back a tiny proportion of what it should have paid.

She names and shamed Google and Amazon, whose tax dodging arrangements recently led to a huge amount of parliamentary scrutiny, but Apple does the same sort of thing so it is probably going to be facing the wrath of May too.

May has handed her home secretary job to Amber Rudd—who will now be responsible for the government’s push for greater online surveillance laws.

This should place her at odds with the minister now in charge of withdrawing the UK from the European Union. David Davis, who has—for years—opposed the government’s attempts to bring in a so-called Snoopers’ Charter and is suing the government over DRIPA—legislation that was rushed through by the Tories after the European Court of Justice had ruled that the Data Retention Directive was invalid for failing to have adequate privacy safeguards in place.